rcd@ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn) (11/30/90)
In the midst of the r$ fray, mrm@sceard.Sceard.COM (M.R.Murphy) suggests: > Another way (not the only way :-) is to handle moderation of source and binary > groups in the same way that refereed journals handle a similar problem. Have the > moderator farm out the submissions to a group of interested folk... This strikes me as one of the few possibly-useful suggestions I've seen. I review journal articles fairly often, and I've seen that the system can support a heavy load. (To be fair, I *haven't* been in the editor's chair.) If you've got a good group of people available to draw on, you can get folks with special interests who can pay particular attention to the details of what they're reviewing. You can get more than one person to look at stuff, as a sanity check. And you can smooth over busy periods for the reviewers. (Editor asks reviewer "Can you handle this? If so, have it back to me in n weeks." No response is the same as a negative response, meaning "no, can't do it now." Editor keeps trying 'til there are reviewers set up, then waits for response. Editor's job is somewhat more boring, on average...but much less demanding.) To answer an obvious question that some of you are itching to reply/follow up with, "yes, I would be willing to be such a reviewer." That's one reason I think it would work and might be worth a try--the reviewer's task is one that I can see myself taking on. (Plus it would probably be a damned sight more interesting than some of the journal submissions I've seen!:-) OK, so let's ask: - Is there any glaring flaw in Murphy's idea? - How many folks would be willing to contribute at the "reviewer" level? -- Dick Dunn rcd@ico.isc.com -or- ico!rcd Boulder, CO (303)449-2870 ...Mr. Natural says, "Use the right tool for the job."
abeals@autodesk.com (Plu festu, uloj) (12/01/90)
Dick Dunn talks about a "reviewer" strategy to help out moderators. Good idea, but still has a single point of failure. A better way would be to have multiple moderators - each moderator gets a copy of each submission. If the moderator thinks it's worth sending out, s/he drops a copy onto the newsgroup ****using a modified copy of the original message-id**** [<- yo, important point there]. You might ask "What does this buy us? Multiple copies of messages in the newsgroup?" By using a *modified copy* of the original message-id, for example, if the original message-id of the submission mail message was "<123456@mintaka.bedford.com>", the modified message-id of the posted message would be something like "<comp.unix.sources-123456@mintaka.bedford.com>". Thus, if multiple moderators posted the same message, the news software would reject the posting as a duplicate, as it would already have a message by that message-id in its history database. What this means is that if two moderators send out a copy of the same source posting, some folks will see the posting as coming from one moderator [and set of paths] and others will see it as coming from a different moderator, by a different route. In this scheme, so long as all the moderators don't get sick or go on vacation at once, someone will take up the slack and postings will continue to appear. Simple, neat, elegant. -- Andrew Scott Beals abeals@autodesk.com